In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Farmer said: “Years ago, I wrote an essay titled, ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a dependent clause.’ I wrote this in an attempt to correct a chronic punctuational error in one of the carols. Whatever the broadside sheet in the British Museum shows, there should be a comma after ‘merry’. Now, who am I to quibble with a Pulitzer Prize winning author and music critic? And yet fools rush in where angels fear to tread. It would not surprise me if the original had no punctuation at all… So, God rest you, merry gentlemen, in this Christmas season, and that’s the way I’m going to consider the carol until better evidence comes along.” Rest easy I will believe nothing until I see the actual broadside sheet in the British Museum. Schonberg’s research eventually brought him to this resting place: “Scholars of the day were notoriously inaccurate. Still others left the comma out completely, perhaps hoping to avoid a dispute with fellow music lovers. Some place the punctuation mark between ‘ye’ and ‘merry’ others where Schonberg assumed it belonged. His curiosity led him from the Lincoln Center to the New York Public Library, where he searched through hymnals looking for comma placement. Everybody knows that the correct punctuation is ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen.’” “The title looked wrong to me,” Schonberg writes, “and in a moment I remembered why. We are not being invited to rest, but encouraged to rest merry - that is, remain in a state of merriness The author had the song title punctuated as follows: ‘God rest ye, merry gentlemen’. He tells about how, leafing through a book published in 1859, he came across a reference to the carol. Writing in the New York Times in 1971, Pulitzer Prize winning author and music critic, Harold Schonberg, recounts his quest to solve the mystery. I’ve left it out intentionally here because I want to see if you know where it belongs.īefore you answer too quickly, you should know this is a matter of scholarly debate. The familiar Christmas carol ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’ should include a comma in the title. In the 21 st Century, if someone says the word ‘merry’ we know what comes next. Maybe people talked about making merry or being merry 100 years ago, but those usages went out with top hats and the industrial revolution. No one says to his or her sweetheart: “Merry valentine’s day.” We don’t wish our neighbours a merry bonfire night. There is really only one time of year when the word ‘merry’ becomes a regular part of our vocabulary. Dr Sharon James on challenging radical feminism and critical race theory.
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